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Business Shapers: Peter Usborne

Posted on 13 April 2016

Peter Usborne featured on Jazz Shapers, a radio programme broadcast on Jazz FM, presented by Mishcon de Reya's Director of Business Development, Elliot Moss.

Transcript

Business Shapers

Business Shapers: Peter Usborne MBE

Founder and Managing Director of Usborne Publishing

Business Shapers from Mishcon de Reya

In association with Jazz FM’s Jazz Shapers

Usborne Publishing is a fairly substantial children’s publishing company that I started 41 years ago and we have grown and grown and we are now I suppose one of the leading children’s book publishers in this country. 

I started my publishing career at Oxford University where I started a so-called funny magazine.  My magazine wasn’t particularly funny but I kept going and it got funnier and funnier and eventually we turned it into Private Eye Magazine.  I left Private Eye after about 3 years because I was so called managing director and I had almost nothing to do and I ended up working for a large publishing group as the chairman’s assistant and after a couple of years of doing that my wife rang up and said ‘I have got some news you are going to be a father’ and I marched into my boss’s room which was just through the door and said ‘John can I stop being your assistant and can I have something to do with children’ and he said ‘Okay Peter you will find we own a publishing company called McDonald which has an educational publishing department get yourself a job’ and I did.  I got promoted and promoted and eventually I met my boss and he said ‘what are you going to do next’ and then I had a real moment of terror and said ‘well I really want to start my own company’ and he said to me quite incredibly ‘ask me for the money’ and I did and I made a business plan and it involved borrowing £20,000 and I took it to a friend and said ‘how is this for a business plan’ and he said ‘well it has only got one mistake, add a nought’.  So I did and asked for £200,000, I got it and I started Usborne publishing. 

I want my books to be as edible as those bottles of sweets one used to see in old fashioned post offices I remember so well from my childhood, I want my books to be something you want to put in your mouth. 

So my hope now is that I manage to hand over my company to my two children and we are working quite hard on that.   My kids are sort of early 40s, very, very clever young people who I admire and am extremely proud of and if it were possible to hand over successfully the ownership and possibly the running of the company to my kids I would be a very happy corpse.  I would be looking down with great pleasure.

Business Shapers from Mishcon de Reya
In association with Jazz FM’s Jazz Shapers

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